A Cold New World

The Hubble Space Telescope has measured the diameter of a distant
world "Quaoar" more than half the size of Pluto.

Oct.
7, 2002: Astronomers have dubbed it "Quaoar" (pronounced
kwa-whar) after a Native American god. It lies a billion kilometers
beyond
Pluto and moves around the Sun every 288 years in a near-perfect
circle. Until recently it was just a curious point of light. That's all
astronomers could see when they discovered it last June using a
ground-based telescope.

But now it's a world.

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has measured Quaoar and found it
to be 1300 km wide. That's about 400 km wider than the biggest main-belt
asteroid (Ceres) and more than half the diameter of Pluto itself. Indeed,
it's the largest object in the solar system seen since the discovery of
Pluto 72 years ago.

Above:
An artist's concept of Kuiper Belt Object 2002 LM60, also known as Quaoar.
[more]

Quaoar is greater in volume than all known asteroids combined.
Researchers suspect it's made mostly of low-density ices mixed with rock,
not unlike the makeup of a comet. If so, Quaoar's mass is probably only
one-third that of the asteroid belt.

Michael Brown and Chadwick Trujillo of the California Institute of
Technology, Pasadena, Calif. are reporting these findings today at the
34th annual meeting of the Division for Planetary Sciences of the American
Astronomical Society in Birmingham, Ala.

Earlier this year, Trujillo and Brown used the Palomar 48-inch
telescope to discover Quaoar as an 18.5-magnitude object creeping across
the summer constellation Ophiuchus. Although Quaoar was relatively bright
(by the feeble standards of such distant objects) its disk was too small
for the Palomar telescope to resolve.

Brown followed-up their discovery using the Hubble Space Telescope.
Hubble's new Advanced Camera for Surveys revealed the object's true
angular size of 40 milliarcseconds, corresponding to a diameter of about
800 miles (1300 kilometers). Only Hubble has the sharpness needed to
actually resolve the disk of such a distant world.

Above:
Quaoar's size compared to that of Earth, Earth's moon and Pluto. [more]

Like the planet Pluto, Quaoar dwells in the Kuiper Belt, an icy debris
field of comet-like bodies extending 5 billion kilometers beyond Neptune's
orbit. Over the past decade more than 500 icy bodies--Kuiper-Belt Objects
or "KBOs" for short--have been found there. With a few exceptions all have
been significantly smaller than Pluto.

Previous record holders are a KBO called Varuna, and an object called
2002 AW197, each approximately 540 miles across (900 kilometers). Those
diameters were deduced by measuring the objects' temperatures and
calculating a size based on assumptions about the KBOs' reflectivity. Such
estimates are less certain than Hubble's direct measurements.

Below:
This actual Hubble image of Quaoar is a sum of sixteen separate exposures
made with Hubble's new Advanced Camera for Surveys.[more]

Quaoar
(also known as 2002 LM60) hasn't been officially named yet. It's too new.
The International Astronomical Union will make the final decision.
Trujillo and Brown suggested "Quaoar" after a creation god of the Native
American Tongva tribe--the original inhabitants of the Los Angeles basin
where Caltech is located. According to legend, Quaoar "came down from
heaven; and, after reducing chaos to order, laid out the world on the back
of seven giants. He then created the lower animals, and then mankind."

Eventually, predicts Brown, KBOs even larger than Quaoar will be found,
and Hubble will be invaluable for follow-up observations to pin down their
sizes. Meanwhile, Quaoar is the record-holder--a tantalizing glimpse of
perhaps bigger things to come.

Editor's note:
Pluto is both a planet and a member of the Kuiper Belt. Quaoar is merely a
KBO. It's too small to merit automatic planethood. If you ask a dozen
astronomers how big something has to be to be called a planet, you might
get a dozen different answers. The definition of planets is a topic of
lively discussion and size is only one factor. For now, the solar system
has 9 planets. Quaoar is not the 10th. It is, nevertheless, an impressive
and intriguing new world.

The Science Directorate at NASA's Marshall
Space Flight Center sponsors the Science@NASA web sites. The mission of
Science@NASA is to help the public understand how exciting NASA research
is and to help NASA scientists fulfill their outreach responsibilities.

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